For the month of March, I’ve been asked to co-host “The Savvy WAHM’s” Blog Talk Radio Show. A big Thank You to Kendra Tillman of The Savvy WAHM for sharing her interviews with so many successful women entrepreneurs.
Marketing isn’t what it used to be. Customers now have the choice to simply tune you out by clicking away, turning the radio or TV off , hanging up on you or throwing your mail right into the trash without even as much as glance at it! We have to adjust our marketing strategies to have potential customers come to us, rather than us shouting at them.
The internet allows us to do that. The companies who understand that will succeed and the ones who don’t will be left in the dust.
Just yesterday I received a mass email in my inbox from one of my Linkedin connections, offering me Botox (of all things). I immediately replied, “what made him think I needed it.” His reply was that he was sure I had some friends who might need it! How rude! …and with one click he was removed from my connections, as simple as that! He will not get another chance to sell to me.
I guess he has never heard of the CAN-SPAM act (email marketing via permission marketing only).
For the month of March, I’ve been asked to co-host “The Savvy WAHM’s” Blog Talk Radio Show. A big Thank You to Kendra Tillman of The Savvy WAHM for helping all women business owners succeed as entrepreneurs!
We touched briefly on this last week, but this week’s show was dedicated mostly to your website and how search engines help to get you found online. Of course, it all starts with your website. If you are very active on social media sites, but you don’t have a website (a good base with solid search engine optimization), your efforts are null. You will get one little link for Facebook or Twitter, but that just won’t cut it.
Our Goal: To be on the first page of a Google Search
Online marketing differs from offline marketing, because you have to take search engines into account. You are marketing (via your blog, your website, your social media sites) not only to your target market (potential customers), but also to search engines (via your keywords, your content, your reach on social media sites) to get you listed in search results:
Target Market (EQ – Emotional Intelligence)
vs.
Search Engines (purely analytical)
What do you need to do to get found online via search engines?
Create a website (Keywords, Search Engine Optimization, good content that converts visitors and reinforces keywords for search engines)
Include a blog (Relevant and NEW Content for visitors and search engines)
Landing Pages (allows for additional content, more opportunity for potential customers to find you and for search engines to list you. It also provides you with an opportunity to collect email addresses by giving away a free ebook, a guide or other helpful information)
Social Media Sites (WHO do YOU know and WHO knows YOU? What is your reach? How relevant are you in your industry? This is what converts viewers into followers.)
Listings and Relevant Sites (Incoming and Outgoing Links)
The benefits of adding a blog to your website:
Adds new and relevant content for potential customers to find you and to give search engines more opportunities to list you.
Every blog entry creates another landing page to your site.
Enforces keywords used on your site.
Best way to include outgoing links to relevant sites in your industry!
When your blog entries are shared by others via social media sites, it let’s potential customers and search engines know you are relevant in your industry.
Tip for your blog entries: Pick your keywords and write your article around them, so search engines can list you and potential customers can find you. Make sure you optimize each entry and each image used for search engines.
Example: Each one of my blog entries becomes a separate landing page for potential customers to find me.
Inbound and Outbound links:
Include a resource page on your website where you will list relevant websites to your industry or topic. When writing blog posts, include links to relevant sites to your industry and blog entry (outbound links).
Exchange links with business alliances relevant to your industry. List your website on relevant sites (networking sites, community pages, membership sites, Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) for incoming links.
The more links you have, the better, but remember that the sites that you list or that list you need to be relevant to your industry!
Create landing pages to collect email addresses:
Social Media: (will be discussed next week)
Google Analytics
Add Google Analytics and adjust your marketing efforts as needed! Where does your traffic come from?
Once a week in the month of March, we talk about online marketing and what you can do to get your business found online. I will quickly summarize what we talked about in this week’s show and also list the links, so you can download the handouts or listen to the show.
Show 2: Inbound Marketing:
How do people find you online? – March 13th
What makes you different? What problem do you solve?
How search engines help you get found (stay tuned for next blog post)
Permission marketing vs. Interruption marketing (blog post to follow soon)
What makes you different? Why should customers buy from you rather than your competitor?
What is your USP – Unique Selling Proposition?
Pinpointing your USP may take some time and many of us don’t recognize what makes us special until we’ve been in business for ourselves for a while. It requires some hard soul-search searching, creativity, and sometimes even a year or two of being in business and learning more about ourselves and what really makes us (our product or service we offer) tick. If you are an analytical person or have a business degree, you can carefully study and analyze your competitors, but most of us just want to get our feet wet and get started. Trust me, eventually we all realize that we need to sit down and figure out what makes us different from our competitors. It is a key piece in your marketing strategy! How can you convince your target market to buy from you, if you don’t know yourself what makes you (your product or service) different from your competitor?
For example, mine is my unique ability to combine my creativity with my analytical thinking, allowing me to excel in online marketing, where strategic (knowing how search engines work), yet personable communication and engagement (engaging with your target market) is vital to help business owners get found online. I’ve also been told that I have exceptional listening skills, which sure is a big benefit in my line of business. J
How to determine your USP:
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of loving their product. Stop that! Pretend you are a customer and look at your product/service from that view point. Does your product/service offer what a customer would want? And if so, list the items that a customer would appreciate in your product/service.
Don’t undercharge yourself, just because your competition charges less. If you have done your research and your closest competitor charges less, list the reasons why you charge more. Maybe you have a degree that your competitor doesn’t have, maybe your product has features that your competitor’s product doesn’t have. List them and use it in your marketing efforts.
Know your target market! Study and analyze your target market. Put up a picture of your favorite and best customer and write about that person. What attracts him/her to your product/service (convenience, location, ease of purchase, ease of use, they know you in person, you are a good listener, etc.). Once you know why this customer is buying from you, you can figure out your USP!
Once a week in the month of March, we talk about online marketing and what you can do to get your business found online. I will quickly summarize what we talked about here and also list the links, so you can download the handouts or listen to the show.
Show 1: Your Brand Message & Your Website – March 6th
What is branding? When do I need to start thinking about branding?
How do I determine my brand message?
What does my website have to do with branding?
Your website: The Center of your Online Universe
Branding starts when your business starts! It was important before the internet, but with online marketing becoming essential for any business, getting your branding sorted out before you create your website is a necessity! Once your branding is in order and your website is set up, you will take that branding and sweep it across all your social media sites for easy name recognition.
First impressions count! Your online presence needs to reflect you, your business, your product or services. People still buy from people! By carefully choosing colors, your logo, your look, your content, you will attract a certain target market. Too often I hear, “Sure, I’m getting a lot of hits on my website, but I’m just not attracting the right traffic and I am not converting leads into customers.”
If you’ve already been in business, you have your logo and your website, but are not achieving desired results, you might want to take a step back and rebrand yourself. The sooner, the better!
I suggest you come up with a checklist before you start planning your website or rebranding of your current website.
Colors: What colors speak to me? What colors represent me or my product best? Make sure you do a bit of research as colors have a lot of meaning. For example, you might really like blue, but did you know that blue is also known to be an appetite suppressant, so it would not be good for a restaurant, cookbooks or recipes but you can consider it for diet books. Choose wisely! This blog post lists a quick color overview and meanings.
Content: Copywriting is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is essential to engage and convert your leads. Ask your family and business alliances to evaluate your content for feedback. Do they understand what your business is about? Would they take action and contact you? Here is a helpful ebook on copywriting.
Your Website – The Hub of your Online Universe:
Your website has everything to do with branding, because your website is the center of your online universe. Everything you do online to establish your online presence is meant to drive traffic back to your website where you sell your product or services. Therefore, your website is THE HUB for all your efforts online!
Your website branding sets the tone for your online presence. If your website is not optimized (branding and content), than you will not attract the correct target market and it will also make it very difficult to set up and brand your social media sites.
Equally important is that your website is optimized for search engines to find you. If your website is not optimized (for search engines) you will not get ranked, making it impossible for your target market to find you.
A good online marketing strategy considers search engines (completely analytical) and your target market (emotional EQ to draw people in). When you set up your website, consider the importance of search engine optimization. Working with many clients and various websites, I’ve come to appreciate the simplicity of a self-hosted Wordpress site. It allows for plugins to be added to customize your needs and with just a little bit of training, you can handle SEO for your site and blog yourself, saving you a lot of money in the long run.
I know when we first start out, money is tight. Often a DIY website seems like a life saver, but I’m here to tell you from my own experience that investing just a little money out of pocket to do it right from the start will go a long way. Consider outsourcing your logo design, your website design (including SEO), and your branding across all marketing channels (blog, email newsletter, social media sites). If you do outsource, make sure you own your website (you have all your logins) and are able to change content yourself. You’ll thank me for it later!
Without too much warning, timelines were made available for fan pages last week and timelines will be live for all by the end of this month! Anybody who offers welcome tabs as a service was a bit concerned and, trust me, so was I. The ability to set a tab as the landing page was excellent. It allowed customized invitations to “like” the page, links to websites, newsletter sign ups and so much more. Not knowing how Facebook was going to incorporate tabs into the new look gave me a couple of gray hairs.
A couple days later… and all is well in my world! I still see a few people complaining about the fact that we cannot control landing pages anymore, but personally I like the new design, look and feel. It’s a great tool for branding and if you have followed my blog, you know how important online branding is in my book.
Fan pages now look a lot more like a mini-website, wouldn’t you agree?
I love the fact that we can customize the tabs with an image, making the tabs very inviting to click on. Of course, not everyone will know what to do with them right away, but people adjust and learn quickly.
Here is a quick overview of changes:
Tabs (still the old tab, but look at all that extra space!) are now 810px wide, giving us more space for a nicer design!
Likes, maps, tabs and other apps are showing up right under the cover picture and can be switched around! Tabs can have custom images – Yay!
The new administrator panel is very self-explanatory and I like it!
The cover photo allows for great branding! Size is 850px by 315px. There are a few guidelines to follow: No promotion of any kind allowed, meaning no contact information such as website, email address, phone number, pricing or discounts, no references to “like us” or “share”. I guess, this means we just have to get extra creative.
Just like on the personal timeline, you can highlight a story (make it the full width of your page) by clicking on the star icon or you can pin the story to the top of your page by clicking the pencil icon.
Messages are now allowed for fan pages – I say it again.. yay!
All in all, I like the changes. What about you?
Struggling with your cover photo design, contact us! We’ve had a lot of fun with designing the cover photos for our clients so far.
Have you been sucked into online marketing (via social media, blogging, email marketing) yet? Everywhere you turn, there is another social media guru telling you that this is the way of the future, the only way to get found online and that if you are not jumping on the social media bandwagon, your business will be left behind. (See my previous blog post!)
Depending on the type of your business (B2B, B2C) you should choose wisely where your target market can be found (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc.) and then set up your business pages. Not only will you stay in front of your target market this way, but being “popular” can also help with your online ranking assuring that you will be found online more easily.
So, what is the single most important thing to get started on social media sites, blogging, email marketing? Contacts, of course!
But before you start connecting to your contacts, you need to make sure that your message and branding are in order. First impressions count! Your website sets the tone for your company. Your message, content, colors, branding and logo might have proven themselves with offline marketing / direct marketing, but are you ready to brand your business online?
Working with companies in getting their online presence sorted out and sites set up, I can tell you that the best thing you can do for your company is to sit down and sort out your branding, logo, colors, message and your content before you start.
Do you have a website set up already? If so, is it outdated and could use a face lift (logo, colors, message, content)? Get that done first. If you are a small business owner, a simple Wordpress site might be ideal. It allows you to add your own content, add a quick blog and most importantly, you will be able to add your own keywords and descriptions for SEO purposes without hiring an expensive website designer.
Is your logo presentable or could it also use a face lift? If so, then have a graphic designer work with you – logos are not that expensive.
Do your colors represent your company well? The color choice to represent your company, product or service is very important. For example, did you know that blue has also been known to be an appetite suppressant, so it would not be a good choice for restaurants, but you can consider it for diet books. For a full list of what colors stand for, see my previous post “The Importance of Color Choices”.
Is your content outdated? Do you have a vision, a mission, an elevator speech? These are important when you start setting up your social media sites. Just like at networking meetings, you will have only a few seconds to stand out and be memorable on your social media profiles, so make it count!
Once you have the above items sorted out, it will be very easy to set up / brand all your social media sites, so when potential customers land on your social media sites, the recognition for your your company is immediate. It will make finding followers and fans so much easier, in turn growing your business online. Just think of Coke… can you imagine landing on Coke’s Facebook or Twitter page and not instantly know who’s page you landed on? Another good example is Mari Smith – who doesn’t instantly recognize that beautiful blue? Make that your goal!
A year ago I met with a new client. He fully believed in person-to-person networking and wanted nothing to do with a website or online marketing. I talked him into putting up at least a very simple Wordpress website – nothing fancy, because I knew he wasn’t ready. He’s been stewing over his site for a year…
Today we met and we are now talking about… blogging, email marketing, video marketing, social media, finding affiliates to partner and link with! Woohoo!
His exact words were, “there are so many companies just now realizing that they need to be found online to survive and thrive. I’m already ahead of the game, thanks to you!”
Consider this – Stick your head in the sand and you will be left behind!
Follow us on our Facebook page or on Twitter to stay up to date with online marketing tips!
Your expertise is an important piece of the puzzle in creating a successful outcome for your client!
Are you offering B2B services? Do you have an accommodating, easy going, humble nature? Then this is an important read for you:
I often deal with B2B start ups, who struggle with acknowledging their own expertise and knowledge! When we first start out, we are trying to attract new clients and what better way than word of mouth advertising from a satisfied customer, right?
I recently met a graphic designer who was extremely talented, but struggled to find new clients! His own website was incredible. However, his portfolio showed no evidence of such a talent. The images, ads and website he created for his client lacked his eye for colors, layout and EQ of marketing. When I asked him why, he explained that the client always tweaked his original designs and what was in the portfolio was the end result.
Pleasing your clients too much by not sharing the depth of your knowledge and only following instructions (the customer is always right) often ends in NOT achieving the results your client is looking for. The reason why you were hired in the first place was because of your expertise, your creativity, your knowledge in your field and sometimes that means speaking up and explaining why things should be done a certain way to achieve results.
The good news is that with a little tweaking on your part (stepping out of your comfort zone by speaking up when necessary), you might surprise your client by explaining the “WHY” something needs to be done a certain way. This allows your open-minded client to see the benefit of giving you the freedom to do what is necessary and then become a raving fan of your business.
I say… Step out of your comfort zone and GO FOR IT! The results will speak volumes!
The problem with staying healthy and fit is that one has to commit to it every day – well, at least a few days a week. If I could work out for a month, 24 hours a day for all I care, and then be good for a couple of years, I’d be the fittest person in the world. Sadly that just “ain’t” so.
Marketing isn’t any different, especially online marketing. It is a continuous, ongoing effort that we have to commit to to succeed. We cannot write a few blog posts, post many status updates in one day on our social media sites and then forget about it.
I’ll say it again… “Online Marketing is a continuous, ongoing effort that we have to commit to to succeed.”
That being said, it also doesn’t have to become overwhelming. Your favorite fitness coach tells you, all you have to commit to is to exercise 20 minutes a day to stay fit and healthy and, of course, change your daily eating habits. I’m telling you, all you have to commit to is 20 minutes a day to keep your online marketing going, along with 1- 2 hours, once or twice a month to create content for your blog posts and email marketing campaigns. (Initial set up excluded, but you can always outsource that part.)
Social Media Sites. Take 10 – 20 minutes every morning to check what people are saying and respond, respond, respond. Approach it not as a business, but pretend you are face to face and start a conversation. Have fun with it! Facebook Fan Page tips and tricks on how to engage your audience.
Blog. Think of your blog, not as a sales tool, but as sharing your knowledge with your friends. You are the expert in your field and you know so much about what your company offers – share it! Set yourself apart from your competition! Download your SEO tips and tricks from Hubspot here!
Email Campaigns. Collect email address by offering something – a discount, a free eBook, a white paper, a how-to guide, your knowledge and expertise, etc. Stay in touch with your community by sending email campaigns on a regular basis. Don’t hard sell, but include that all important call to action! ”Oh, I’ve been meaning to call you about this or that… good thing I received your newsletter”, is what we all love to hear! In the end it’s about results, isn’t it!
Why do I need to do all this? Just throwing your website up is not enough anymore, unless it is considered an online business card. This means that the only way your company can be found is by typing in the exact URL of your website. If I’m looking for a pizza place in my town online, I’m not searching for a specific place; I’m looking for “A” pizza place and the ones that show up in my search results have the best chance of receiving my business that day!
So, you have added a Facebook fan page to your online marketing mix – Good For YOU!
There are a million and one blog posts about fan pages and content, but I still get the same question almost every day: “What should I post as my status update?” So, I’ve decided to add my own comments here.
My advice is simple:
1. Put yourself in your customer’s position. What would you like to hear from your company?
2. Pick your very favorite customer and write to them specifically as if you were engaging in a conversation at a networking meeting.
3. Have a general strategy, but be flexible. You need to be able to think on your feet. News gets old really fast these days and if your status update is days behind the actual event, no one will care.
The most successful Facebook fan pages are the ones that:
engage their audience
make each fan feel special
don’t hard sell
are clever, educational and/or funny
visually appealing (include images and videos)
have an inviting welcome tab
respond to comments in a timely manner
make it clear what the company is about (if you are selling brooms, cleverly stick with that subject)
are personable
add positive content
provide a newsletter sign up
have a good call to action
have a coupon, give-away, offer deals
are consistent with their content
post on a regular basis
Please understand that a Facebook fan page is only one part of your online marketing mix. Learn how it fits in with the rest of your strategies in my next post…. !
